


i am never without it

by neverwherever



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Friendship/Love, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Chairman Election Arc, Souvenirs, Traveling, and the weight of them, metaphorically speaking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:09:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28085217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverwherever/pseuds/neverwherever
Summary: "He wants to lay all these little pieces of the world at Gon’s feet as if to sayI’m sorry, I’m not sorry I left but I am sorry I left you, but look, look, don’t you ever think I forgot you, don’t you dare feel as if you were only a memory to me, look and see how i was thinking about you everywhere, all the time."As he travels the world with Alluka, Killua gathers souvenirs. They're all for Gon, of course.
Relationships: Alluka Zoldyck & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 12
Kudos: 101





	i am never without it

**Author's Note:**

  * For [t0talcha0s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/gifts).



> Hello and welcome to another self-indulgent journey through Killua's brainscape from yours truly :)

In the Crystal Fields, Killua and Alluka stay in a hotel where the rooms are individual bungalows carved into the huge colorful hunks of mineral jutting out from the earth. The receptionist at the check-in desk asks them which color they would prefer; Alluka picks pink, and as the sun goes down the room is awash in rich hues of rose and bubblegum and pink-lemonade. 

Alluka grins and waves her hand back and forth in the streams of colored light, and Killua thinks of the video Gon sent them that day — the huge flock of small-billed swans and the way the rosy sunset light turned their white feathers to the color of blush. Killua had watched that video at least a dozen times, watching not for the swans but for the flash of Gon’s thumb in the corner of the camera, listening not to their cacophonous bird calls but to the sound of Gon’s faint exclamation in the background.

Killua wakes that night from a vague dream that leaves him with sweat on his collarbones and a lump in his throat, and the bluish moonlight has turned the room a soft purple. 

He misses Gon. A couple days in, and he misses him more than the night before, or the night before that. 

He loves Alluka, and every time she smiles it makes his heart swell, and he misses Gon, and everytime he thinks about him his heart takes a sharp twist. It seems impossible that both these things should exist within him, at the same time; it’s too much, and Killua grabs a fistful of the sheet beneath him and trembles with it. He isn’t trying to replace Gon with Alluka, he really, truly isn’t, that wouldn’t be fair to either of them, but a part of him is whispering _well, you made your choice._

In the morning, Killua sends an email back to Gon to tell him that they won’t always be able to reply to him very often because they have to stay underground, and Gon can keep sending emails to that account but Killua will only be able to check it from encrypted computers. He’ll see them eventually, though, no worries. Killua knows he should snap the eyePad they’ve been using into pieces and bury or burn it so that no one can track them, but he comes up with reasons to wait until Gon’s response pings into his inbox.

Gon sends a sad face emoji, but he understands, of course, and, _Killua, if you’re not gonna be able to talk very often you better make it up to me by bringing me some cool souvenirs!_

Just as they’re about to check out and move on from this place to the next, wherever that may be, Killua chips off a piece of the giant crystal. As he slips it into his backpack, he imagines how it will look on Gon’s windowsill, the one where he scatters seeds for the birds — imagines the golden island sun coming up and casting a warm strawberry-stripe of color across the floor and the covers of the bed where Gon sleeps.

* * *

They spend two days in a city where a famous composer was born. Killua doesn’t care much about old stuffy classical music and Alluka has never really had a chance to hear any, but they go check out the place where the guy lived as a child anyway. It’s small, a little apartment on an innocuous street. The room where the composer was born is barely big enough for the bed, and the wooden floorboards are creaky.

“A great man with humble beginnings,” the tour guide says, eyes shining with near-religious zeal.

The city is full of music, still, hundreds of years after the composer’s death. Along the riverside, on the bridge, in the plazas — there are people singing and playing instruments everywhere. Alluka takes a shine to one busker playing the fiddle and starts dancing right there in the middle of the street, skirts twirling like an opened flower and feet nimbly avoiding the cracks in the cobblestone, uncaring of the watching eyes of passersby. She grabs Killua’s hands and he protests, cheeks blazing, but she pleads, _dance with me, onii-chan,_ and so he does.

Killua tries to remember, that one night on Whale Island when Gon snuck him into the pub by the docks ( _don’t tell Mito-san, Killua, she always gets mad when I come here)_ and there was a local band playing and the fiddler stood on a table and spun out a fast-paced tune that got the fishermen and their wives dancing. How did they do it, again? Feet flying, arms outspread, dizzying spins, all boisterousness and joy, and looking at them made Killua understand why Gon always moved the way that he did.

Alluka delights when he spins her, asks for it again and again and again until she’s dizzy and they’re both laughing but then Nanika comes out and Killua realizes some of the tourists are filming them and he has to abruptly grab his sister by the wrist and pull her away. As he passes between the tourists, he surreptitiously shorts out their phones with his Nen. 

If only freedom did not so easily spill into carelessness.

There’s an artist stall that sells tiny painted wooden music boxes that fit in the palm of Killua’s hand. Killua picks one up and winds the little key in the back and opens it, and it plays one of the composer’s most famous tunes.

It’s a lullaby. Killua knows this because sometimes Gon would hum it to himself when he was trying to fall asleep. He said Mito used to sing it to him, when he was real little. 

It costs 20 jenny, and the vendor wraps it up in brown paper and twine. Killua tucks it into the front pocket of his backpack.

* * *

They’re in this tiny narrow country that consists mainly of coastline, famous for its dramatic cliffs. Famous even more for the flowers that grow only along those steep windy drop-offs of stone — delicate butter-yellow things with petals arranged in a helical fashion. They’re like soft little sweet-smelling coils.

Alluka stands a few feet from the edge of the cliffs, hundreds of feet above the thrashing sea. Killua is just about to move to pull her back when she turns around to look at him and there’s Nanika, grinning with reddened cheeks in the brisk wind, her long black hair hopelessly tangled.

Killua picks one of the flowers and takes it back with him to their hotel room before he realizes he has no way of preserving it. Alluka does a search on the room’s computer and tells him that he can press it between large books and dry it out.

Killua doesn’t carry around any heavy items (it pays to pack light) but he finds a Bible in the drawer of the nightstand and places the flower between its ultra-thin pages.

“What’s that?” Alluka asks from where she watches him, perched cross-legged atop her bed covers.

Killua just shrugs, because nothing has ever given him a good enough reason to believe in a god, let alone know anything about anyone’s holy book. But the Bible is perfect for this purpose; he carries it around in his backpack for a while until the flower dries completely, and then peels it carefully out from the pages where it rests between _love is patient, love is kind_ and _it keeps no record of wrongs._ He tears out a few pages to keep the flower wrapped in and leaves the rest of the book behind; keeps it in an envelope in an outer pocket of his pack. His fingers brush against it every time he reaches in for Alluka’s papers or her latest visa (it’s so much harder to get a non-hunter across border lines).

Gon will like it, he knows this for sure. He was always a geek when it came to rare plants they came across in their travels. Botany, zoology, biology — Gon might say he’s not smart enough to learn about it all, but he knows more about that stuff than anyone Killua has ever met. Killua doesn’t know when he’ll get the chance to give the flower to him (when it will feel right to see him again) but until then, he is ever-conscious of it — of its fragility, and its smallness, and the subtle fragrance of it he can still catch every time he unzips that pocket.

* * *

Traveling with Alluka is … different. It’s fun, of course it is — even after two years traipsing around with Gon, there’s still so, so much of the world Killua has never seen. And Alluka, of course, has seen even less. So they stay on the move constantly; they throw darts at maps, they place their fingers on spinning globes, they flip to random pages in almanacs. For several weeks, they follow along the gradual curve of a river across a whole continent. 

They eat in tourist-trap restaurants where the menus are slick and colorful and the food costs too much but comes in fun shapes, and dim-lit cozy cafes where music plays softly and old men play cards at the corner tables, and roadside stands that no health inspector has ever set eyes upon but which serve up food that’s flavorful and cheap.

They laugh too loudly in fancy museums and laze around in the soft grass of public parks and walk with their heads tilted back through extravagant palaces where no one lives anymore. They float in lakes where the water is so clear the fish look like they’re swimming through air, they hike through forests where thick carpets of leaves and pine needles amplify and muffle their footsteps in turn, they ride on the backs of horses and camels and other animals Killua didn’t even know you could ride. They see ruins and relics and temples and skyscrapers, sometimes right next to each other. The history of the world is written on top of itself again and again and again.

There’s nowhere they have to be and no one to tell them what to do and they get drunk on it sometimes, the unbridled freedom of it.

But sometimes, Killua is struck by sudden reckless urges — to jump aboard passing trains as they walk beside the tracks, or to leap from rooftop to rooftop, or to run careening down steep mountainsides — and he must refrain. Alluka wouldn’t be able to keep up with him in things like that — she’s never been trained, and Killua is so thankful for that, but he can’t do all the things he did with Gon, with her.

The thing is, Killua never really got a childhood, and he won’t get one now, but that’s okay. If he can make sure Alluka gets one, that’s good enough for him.

(And well .... maybe he did have a childhood, for a little while, in bits and pieces: late-night pillow fights, ice cream for breakfast, play-wrestling in public places, pointless little contests, nights sleeping under the stars … but that’s over, now. That’s finished.)

As much as he can, wherever he goes, Killua picks up pieces of the world to carry with him. A keychain with a soft threaded ball at the end of it - a miniature version of the world’s largest ball of yarn (which, in Killua’s professional opinion, was not that big and smelled faintly of mildew besides). 

A little vial of soil from the Limahayan Mountains, home to the world’s tallest mountain, which the locals call the Gods’ Spindle due to the fact that it has miles-long sheer cliff faces on all sides and the top is nearly always shrouded in clouds. It’s nearly impossible to climb, and dozens die every year trying. The people native to the area believe that anyone who manages to reach the summit will receive something from the gods - either a blessing or a curse, depending on their purity of heart. Killua itches to try, but with Alluka in tow it is simply out of the question and in all honesty, he isn’t sure how he would measure up under the gods’ scrutiny anyway. 

A chunk of coal hewn out from a stretch of deep and labyrinthine mines that used to fuel most of the world but have since been abandoned due to a series of cave-ins. They get to ride a minecart down as deep into the chilly claustrophobic tunnels as it’s safe to go, and their tour guide does his level best to scare them with historical tales of death and disaster, though Killua finds them quite tame. The piece of coal Killua takes is heavier than he expected, and blackens the bottom of his backpack until he wraps it up in a spare sock. 

A green abalone ring blessed by the monks of the Underwater Temples off the east coast of Kakin. The temples were built long ago in a natural air pocket within an underwater cave. The cave, made of some pale delicate translucent stone, is in shallow enough water that sunlight still manages to shine through and shimmer off the abalone and mother-of-pearl temple walls. It is the longest sustained underwater air pocket that has ever existed, and no one is sure why; scientists worry that investigating too closely will make it all collapse — Killua suspects Nen is involved somehow, whether it’s being used consciously or not. But the monks make their peace with the fact that at any time, it could all come to a watery end. When Killua first buys the ring, he feels a little stupid because Gon doesn’t even wear jewelry; in the moment it had just reminded him so much of those chunky Greed Island rings (whatever happened to those, Killua wonders? Lost in NGL somewhere, probably, trampled into bloody dirt.)

But his misgivings fall away when the monks chant the blessing for good fortune and safety and the love of the sea, because even though Killua isn’t really sure he believes in all this he likes the idea that a world which has loved Gon so kindly already might smile on him a little more because of something Killua gave him. 

All these things and more go into the front pocket of Killua’s backpack, an extra weight that Killua is always conscious of even when he isn’t. Some of the souvenirs wouldn’t break if you dropped a boulder on them; some of them would crack at just a touch too much pressure. Killua is careful when he sets his pack down, he is deliberate with where he places his head when he is forced to use it as a pillow. He lives in the present and exists in the moment and when he walks beside Alluka he is with her entirely, but at the same time he moves with the subconscious intent to protect his cargo. The souvenirs fill up that front pocket and soon he has to add them to the middle pocket as well, and he starts sneaking some of his clothes amongst Alluka’s luggage. 

“Onii-chan,” she says with exasperation the third time she catches him doing it, “why don’t you just mail some of these to Gon?”

Killua doesn’t really know how to explain that he wants to see Gon’s face when he sees all of these things and that he wants to hold each one in his hands and tell Gon just why Killua thought he would like it. He wants to overwhelm him, wants to see his eyes go wide. He wants to carry them with him for as long as he can. He wants to lay all these little pieces of the world at Gon’s feet as if to say I’m sorry, _I’m not sorry I left but I am sorry I left you, but look, look, don’t you ever think I forgot you, don’t you dare feel as if you were only a memory to me, look and see how i was thinking about you everywhere, all the time._

* * *

They get tired, sometimes. Constant travel is exhausting — late night trains, long flights, short naps in uncomfortable seats with their necks at odd angles. Every few days they wake up in new beds. On the earliest mornings, it sometimes takes Killua several disconcerting seconds to remember where he is. Alluka’s feet start dragging, and Nanika comes out more and more. 

Killua starts to feel … well, homesickness would be the word for it, if he had a home. Whatever he’s yearning for isn’t so simple, though.

So sometimes, they find a safe middle-of-nowhere place and linger for at least a week. Sometimes longer. A prairie house hidden in wide stretches of broad swaying field grasses. A wind-smoothed cabin on a cold and quiet rocky northern beach. A one-room treehouse insulated from the elements atop a tall mountain. A cottage in the woods with its edges softened by swaths of ivy.

There, they sleep. They eat simple but filling meals. They sit outside, silent together, and look at the sky. They go for walks — sometimes together, but usually alone. 

Killua is on one such walk, early in the morning one day. They are in untouched forested wilderness, miles from the nearest little convenience store. Killua had left Alluka sleeping in a cozy pile of blankets while he slipped out into the gray predawn chill; he would be back before she woke, and they would make pancakes out of premade mix on the gaslit stove. 

Killua walks, shoes crunching in old leaves and broken underbrush, and feels strange. Feels at once very much within his body and very much untethered to it. Feels a growing space just beneath his lungs. Feels as though these peaceful days, wherein he has no task to complete and no objective to focus on, are like someone lifting constant pressure from a wound. Feels as though he is quietly, quickly bleeding.

Killua’s breathing is suddenly ragged, and he stops. He looks up at the tree tops, standing tall and still. He looks out at the wilderness all around, the miles and miles of trees, the beautiful uncaring forest. He looks towards the horizon, and the sun rises above that distant line in that moment, shooting pure golden morning light through the tree branches and onto the dew-damp ground and into Killua’s eyes. 

Suddenly, he is crying.

He is crying, and he sits down at the base of a thick tree trunk, and he wraps his arms around his middle, and he keeps crying.

He hadn’t cried when he carried Gon’s feather-light body out of those deep wild woods in East Gorteau. Hadn’t cried during the ride into the city where the hospital was, holding on to Gon and not letting anyone else touch him until the nurses lifted him out of Killua’s arms and on to a stretcher. Hadn’t cried when Leorio and Knuckle and Bisky and everyone had tried to comfort him, hadn’t cried sitting in that sterile cold corridor outside Gon’s room. Hadn’t cried, even, during that terrible pleading moment of _please, heal Gon._ Hadn’t cried since.

So he cries now, for all of that, and for all the rest: for that painful lonely childhood, for leaving Alluka behind for so long, for that boy he once was who didn’t know what love was and never expected to have it, for that slightly older boy who had thought he and Gon would stay together forever and ever no take-backs, for that boy sobbing in the middle of a forest, right now, missing his best friend.

And eventually, his tears slow, and he pulls a sleeve over his hand to wipe at his face, and he sniffs hard a few times, and he moves to stand. When he puts his hand down, it lands on a pine cone, which he picks up and slips in his pocket without really thinking about it.

On the walk back, the skin of his face feels tight with dried tears and his mind is clear and he feels emptied out, but not hollow. A tightly-wound piece of him he hadn’t realized was resting in his stomach all this time has come untied. It’s not a bad feeling.

When he walks in the door of the cabin, Alluka is already making pancakes in her robe and fuzzy socks. She’s halfway through pouring a bag of chocolate chips into the pancake mix when he enters and she turns to face him. She takes a good look at his face, pauses, and then adds the rest of the bag.

Killua puts the pine cone on his nightstand and leaves it there all throughout the day, which is a quiet one, and throughout the evening, when they build a fire in the stone hearth and drink hot chocolate and just … talk. They let the fire burn down to embers and slip into their beds before its heat fades from the room and in the morning, the pine cone has opened — like a clenched fist relaxing into an opened hand.

Killua adds it to the front pocket of his backpack, alongside all the other little meaningful meaningless things.

* * *

In the summertime, this coastal town is full to bursting with vacationers. They bare pale stretches of skin while lazing on the beaches, and they race boats with brightly-colored sails, and they drink fruity cocktails and dance in conga-lines down the boardwalk.

Summer ended months ago, but there is still occasionally a day warm enough for Alluka to put on her flowy tankini with a skirt bottom and stretch out on the sand, the brim of her straw hat tipped over her eyes. They’ve only been there about a week, which is more than enough time to take in the few off-season sights the town has to offer. It’s a little town when it isn’t overflowing with tourists, and all the shopkeepers in the quaint downtown know most of their customers by name. 

One afternoon they get ice cream from a tiny parlor where the floor is checkered black-and-white and the tabletops are in the shape of boat wheels. Killua gets a double serving of chocolate fudge brownie, and Alluka gets a generous scoop of lemon sorbet with a vanilla wafer stuck into it. They walk down to the pier, populated only by squawking seagulls and a couple sitting together with their feet dangling over the edge of the dock.

Everything about this place is faintly familiar. And all of it — the sea birds, the blue waves sighing upon the beach, the weathered but friendly locals, the sand they carry around in the soles of their shoes — reminds Killua of where he really wants to be.

Alluka takes a bite of her vanilla wafer and tosses the rest of it to the gulls, who dive after it in a feathery swarm. A strong breeze comes off the sea, making goosebumps rise on both their arms.

“It’ll be winter soon,” Alluka says. “What do you say we go somewhere warmer, onii-chan?”

Tomorrow, a long distance train will arrive in this town’s little station. It came from further up north in the continent and will continue all the way south, all along the coast. Even now it is chugging steadily towards them. If they board it, it will take them to Dolle Harbor within a day. From there, they’re only one direct ferry ride away from Whale Island. Killua knows this; Alluka does too. It’s the real reason they’re in this town, though neither have said as much. All they have to do is decide: to board that train, or not.

In Killua’s pocket is a tiny ceramic figurine in the shape of a whale, which he bought from a local artist’s shop downtown. He reaches in and touches it; it’s smooth as a river stone in his palm.

“Yeah,” he says. “Somewhere warmer would be nice.”

* * *

When they show up at the Freecss’ doorstep Gon is ecstatic, but something about him is oddly reserved, too. He does not, as Killua half-expected, immediately launch himself at Killua for a joyful hug. He is being strangely careful. There’s something timid about the way he asks if they’d like to share his room while they’re there. Gon is never timid. But now at the end of every suggestion he makes is a hurried _if you want, only if you want,_ as if he is expecting Killua to shoot him casually down. As if Killua ever would.

At first Killua thinks, maybe Gon is mad at him. But no, no — Killua has seen Gon’s anger. It gathers a storm on his brow and hardens his shoulders to stone; it does not turn him shy and his touches brief.

This, Killua eventually concludes, is something very rare: Gon’s fear. It’s there in his eyes when they flicker away from Killua’s, and in the tense restrained corners of his smiles. Gon is scared of Killua, somehow — scared, perhaps, that time apart has lessened the space he takes up in Killua’s stupid stricken heart. Scared that Killua might look at him coolly, scared that he might speak to him harshly. 

Killua’s not sure where Gon would have got these ideas but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. The thought makes him ache, and he isn’t sure how to prove him wrong. Except, of course, to show him.

Killua sits cross legged on the floor of Gon’s bedroom and looks at all the souvenirs laid out on the floor in front of him — some large, some small, some cheap, some priceless. He wonders if he should have wrapped them all individually, or put them in some kind of nice box, or, well, _something_ to make it look like more than a random pile of junk and treasures. But he hadn’t thought of that, and so here he is. Eventually he just ends up piling them all carefully into a tote bag that reads “I ❤️ YORKNEW” and lugging it down the stairs.

Killua reaches the foot of the stairs and hears that, in the next room, Gon is talking to Alluka. Killua moves to the doorway and sees he is showing her how to do different knots with a piece of colorful braided rope. He’s just come back from fishing, it looks like; his waterproof boots are lying askew by the door and his fishing pole is leaning up against the wall and the sun is still lingering in his skin and eyes and hair.

Gon wraps the little piece of rope around Alluka’s outstretched wrist and ties it there with a quick, precise knot. “A bracelet for you,” he says. He produces another piece, and ties that one around her other wrist with just as much finesse. “And one for Nanika!”

Alluka giggles, and gives way to Nanika, who is blushing a little.

“Thank you,” she says, quietly and sweetly.

Killua watches them, and feels warm, and the bag in his arms is heavy, and it weighs nothing. What does love weigh, after all? As much as a broken body, or as much as a sunbeam, or as much as a random assortment of gifts. Difficult to bear and impossible to live without.

“Gon,” he says. Gon turns towards him, and his smile broadens. “I … have something for you.”

Gon blinks at him in surprise, and the surprise lingers even as Killua comes to sit on the floor across from him and hands him the bag, even as he takes out all the odd little gifts one by one, even as Killua tells him the story behind each one, with occasional help from Alluka, who watches curled up in the nearby armchair, up until the last — that tiny, breakable blue whale — which he sets down on the coffee table and stares at for a long moment.

Killua shifts, and bites the inside of his lip. “Do you like it?”

Gon lifts his head, and the light through the windows flashes off the water welling up in his eyes. “You got all this stuff just for me?”

Killua feels a blush rising to his face. He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah I, I did. But it’s not a big deal or anything —”

“It _is_ a big deal!” Gon protests. He sniffs loudly, and just as the first tears start rolling down his cheeks, he launches himself forward, shouting, “Killuaaa!”

Killua is knocked backwards by the force of Gon throwing his arms around him and hits the floor with a soft _oof._ Gon puts his face against Killua’s shoulder and starts bawling. Killua’s blush deepens and he wraps his arms around Gon’s strong but scrawny frame and grabs two handfuls of his jacket. Alluka hides a smile behind her hand.

“Idiot,” Killua says softly. “What are you crying for?”

“I thought about you e-every day,” Gon sobs, muffled into his shoulder, and Killua’s own eyes start blurring over.

He doesn’t say, _me too._ He doesn’t need to, after all; the evidence is scattered there all around them. And soon Gon will sit up and wipe his eyes and set about placing these pieces all around the house: pieces of the world and of Killua and of Gon himself. Every corner Killua turns will reveal another one of his additions to this house, this home. Knick-knacks on the mantle, pictures on the wall, various keychains on Gon’s backpack where they rattle noisily together. 

The ceramic whale sits on the bathroom sink and the pink crystal rests on Gon’s windowsill, where every morning the sun streams in on the three of them lying there sleeping.

**Author's Note:**

> (someone: you realize like all your hxh fics end with the boys hugging right  
> me:[ and what about it?](https://www.google.com/search?q=and+what+about+it+gif&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS755US759&sxsrf=ALeKk02kb26M6VYCCEiGGdj0pHlj1dmy1g:1608012379192&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgrZ_1qM_tAhVo1lkKHfR1BKcQ_AUoAXoECBQQAw&biw=1440&bih=821#imgrc=4CUQbN-mBdsrNM))
> 
> Thank you for reading and as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts!


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